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Monday, March 21, 2011

Hyperventilating over hyper-injunctions

There has been much hyperventilation in the blawgosphere in recent days over so-called 'hyper-injunctions', after John Hemming MP used the term in a Parliamentary debate last Thursday to refer to "an injunction in a case where someone is not even allowed to refer to the existence of these proceedings", even (or especially) to their MP. Unsurprisingly considering Mr Hemming's history, the family courts were one of the targets of his ire: "it is a dreadful abuse of state power to threaten to remove a child from the care of the parents because they deign to speak to their Member of Parliament". For all of the details, you can read the Hansard report of the debate here. If you don't have time to wade through Hansard, read this blog post by Anna Raccoon.

2 comments:

What do you think of this, John? At first blush one or two of the cases John Hemming raises seem odd - especially the orders (or undertakings) not to contact MPs.

But reading the debate itself, I began to get the impression this was actually a mixed bag of complaints against social workers in particular, proceeding on the assumption that anything involving an MP is so important that it should override every other important right or duty - including the welfare principle.

The debate needs to be read in the light of the fact that Mr Hemming has an axe to grind against the family justice system. Accordingly, I have not got anywhere near as worked up as others about his 'revelations'.

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